This collection of short stories are all about love, and mainly about loosing it. Noticeable that the majority deal with a lesbian relationship, which certainly allows a different take from the "oh, he's left me" style of love. Some of them grabbed me more than others, in some of them there's a sense of what happened next being a mystery - leaving Hamish & Don on a mountain in Scotland has to the be ultimate in cliff-hangers - which feels like there is unfinished business there. The other thing that dawned on me is that most of these tales are about a longer-standing relationship, some of them had been a couple for 10 to 15 years before we hear about them, this isn't the usual young love, this is a more mature, more settled kind of affection that is being turned on its head. Maybe that increases the surprise at the breakup at all.
Teh writing is at times start and at others lyrical. I believe she also writes poetry and in the rhythm of some of the sentences, that really comes out, she has a ear for a turn of phrase, that is for sure.
It's not always a very hopeful set of stories, in some of them you wonder how the narrator will extricate themselves from their situation. Yet, bizarrely, the one that I found most hopeful was the one about the man whose wife has left him and he's decided to commit suicide. Something in the fact that he wants to do it without it looking like suicide and by doing so starts to pull his life together makes me think that he, of anyone in the book, will make it through d out the other side of the breakup slough of despond. ( )